jessewmc

Reminds me of a project posted here a little while ago for exactly that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13552376

I don't think the dark patterns are a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. The machine maximizes input of human attention for the output of money.

The only thing really surprising about Facebook is how consistently well they have executed that function, and for how long they have incrementally optimized it. Zuckerberg deserves some blame/credit for that for sure.

I'm struggling a bit with your second paragraph. I think there's something interesting here, but I'm not quite clear on your argument.

Data is the opposite of the paradox of value, in that one person's data is completely useless, but each additional person worth of data adds a greater and greater marginal utility (probably not linearly so, maybe an s-curve or something). Is this what you are saying?

I haven't read the book you link so perhaps that is why I misunderstand.

TIL, thanks. That's a more prosaic answer than I was expecting but clever and makes sense.

> using the latest GPUs and machine learning techniques

I have no expertise in either graphics or machine learning, but is this just buzzword for its own sake, or is there actually any way that machine learning is applicable to a mathematical problem like rendering?

Again, from my position of relative ignorance, it seems like graphics is largely a well defined problem space that needs mathematical ingenuity and bigger/better hardware thrown at it, rather than building a black box function by training it on sample inputs and outputs (what would that even look like?)

In fact that's probably a useful way of looking at a lot of systems that may be broken or poorly optimized -- governments and corporations come to mind.

I don't think you're responding to the point. The point is that speech--methods of communication--are being restricted here, which hurts legitimate users and does not prevent anyone from performing these heinous acts.

The whole point of speech protections is that you have to allow people to say things you don't want them to say in order to protect the things you do want to be said.

Going after the speech here is a pandering waste of time that infringes on fundamental rights. The actual crimes here are what need to be chased after.

And the parent's point is a strong one -- why would you discourage criminals from using an open communication medium?? If we can't stop these people when they communicate openly how on earth are we going to do so if we drive them underground? Enforcement, police resources, whatever you want to call it is the issue here. Pushing the communication out of sight and pretending something has been done about the problem is the complete opposite of a solution, it makes people feel like something has been done while making the problem less visible and no more solved.

I think you've just redefined 'deception' as things you don't like.

How is it not deceptive to make a user wait longer than the task takes? (Perceived benefit aside)

How is it not benevolent to make the progress bar smooth even if the underlying process is not?

Most users don't and shouldn't need to understand a process that may not progress linearly.

The article is pretty clearly operating on a definition of 'deception' where it means showing the user something different than the underlying process.

Over the last fifteen years there have been three times as many wingsuit deaths as freesolo deaths, for what its worth.

That's an interesting hypothesis about the economies of home cooked food. I'm not so sure about your conclusion though. Certainly there is no way I could purchase equivalent food that I cook for even a vastly inflated accounting of my own labour costs. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but here are some ideas:

Some food I cook has to be prepared fresh. This becomes a last mile problem, where to have someone else do it they must either already be in my home or travel to it when I want food. There is still a travel problem if we instead say that I have to go somewhere else to eat.

I do cook some food ahead of time (lunch, for example) which would be more feasible. But I still have some problems with this. One of which is customization -- allergies, food preferences etc are numerous and present infinite combinations. That kind of customization eats into economies of scale rapidly.

Freshness is still a problem here -- say you can make food for the next week ahead, but that still basically means the travel/shipping time from the point of 'manufacture' is limited to a few hours at best if refrigerated.

Another problem is it becomes much harder for me to verify what was put in the food. There are strong incentives for a third party to put preservatives, sugar and salt, or cheap substitute ingredients that I don't want. You can work to regulate something like that, but it's expensive to police products with such a short life span.

Maybe no one has tried hard enough to solve this yet, or there are big cultural obstacles, but I'm not convinced that there really are economies of scale here, even if you account for unpaid labour.

These are real economic costs to outsourcing food making. I would love to outsource it, but there just isn't a cost effective way of doing it. I suspect that if the economies of scale here were real someone would already be doing it on a large scale and making a lot of money.

SEEKING FREELANCER -- REMOTE OK, prefer Canada based (I am in Calgary) -- ruby on rails developer

Looking for someone to take lead on a small, relatively simple rails app. I've done a bit of ground work, but looking for someone to drive to completion.

Willing to work with highly experienced developers looking for a quick project to knock out or motivated students/new grads/autodidacts who want a bit of supervision. Will pay accordingly.

I would consider someone looking to get into rails development with other experience.

If project goes well I will have further maintenance and feature work if desired.

Please get in touch jesse at chamfer dot ca

Political issues aside, firefox is much less usable as a development tool than chrome.

When quantum came out I switched to dev edition to try it out, but I've had nothing but trouble. Page loads of local unbuilt code are 2-3x slower than chrome. Tabs crash with alarming regularity, especially after the most recent update. There is still no way to inspect websocket frames. Form inputs are black text on dark background with the dark theme of developer edition.

At least I can get CSS source maps working, which seems to be impossible in chrome these days. But really that's the only plus for a lot of negatives. I'd love to be using firefox instead of chrome, but after this most recent update I get several tab crashes a day and I've finally given up as it's become a hindrance to productivity. I wish it weren't so.

When you say you're going back to 'the good old way', out of curiosity, what do you mean? 'Unobtrusive' JS and ajax here and there, but primarily server rendered templates? Or something else?

Just as a tangent, the term for this is 'hypergamy' and one can find more research and writing on it searching for that.

Curious why you come to that conclusion? That study itself says the watches were within acceptable error for their purposes. Why would you need more accuracy than the roughly 2% error on the Apple Watch?

I wonder if there is a technical reason for that or if they aren't ready for possible cannibalisation yet.

I was really hoping it wouldn't require a phone at all.

Would you not consider shadow profiles a form of imprisonment? Perhaps not quite as strong as voluntarily giving heaps of information, but still a rich source of data on people who do not use Facebook.

I think that in any comprehensible time scale, accelerationism is an inevitable outcome rather than a desirable outcome.

I can see a conscious set of lifeforms that would prefer to burn slowly and enjoy existence in a relatively sustainable manner.

It does however seem inevitable that life will -- if it does not fail completely -- spill out of our planet into the universe as you say in the form of machines or 'AI', rather than meatbags. Life is a game with winners and losers and winning is selecting for superior reproduction, technology, and colonisation.

I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. It is possible to be secular and still learn from religious texts and philosophy. In fact I think that is probably something to strive for.

Perhaps I misread you, but it almost seems as if you are suggesting that this brilliance cannot be accessed by secular minds.

Also, use a guard on angle grinders! And keep it in between you and the work! A man was killed by an exploding cutting disk at a company I used to work at. Shrapnel lodged in his chest, he took the guard off to get at something more easily.

A4s (and to a slightly lesser extent all other Audis) have been, up until very recently, among the most unreliable new vehicles for sale since the model's inception.

Combine that with expensive Audi parts, expensive and zealous dealership labour, and they are unbelievably expensive to maintain.

I own a 2006 that I bought for a song--I do my own service, so I was willing to take a bit of risk. The cars are very difficult to work on, even an oil change involves special tools and working around a poorly laid out engine bay. It takes me twice as long to do as any other car I've done.

The previous owner of my car put 120,000km on it. I only have the last 50,000km or so of records, but in that time it was towed to the dealer at least twice according to the service records, and she spent upwards of $10,000 on regular service ($250 oil changes? yep) and fixing broken stuff that shouldn't break at that mileage (turbo blowoff valve, ignition coils on more than one occasion, brake lines, the list goes on). She spent over $1000 on every trip to the dealer in that time.

I do not understand anyone who buys a new Audi, or for that matter any German car. It's ridiculous.

It might be worth pointing out that if you're having trouble finding a console to play this on, refurbished Wii-Us are still an option for $200.

https://store.nintendo.com/

I bought one since I wanted some party games and didn't have any Nintendo console anymore. It was more than worth it. Mind you this was before end of life so the calculus might be a bit different now.

The temperatures are very moderate in the winter, but the rain is bad. It can, and does, rain for multiple consecutive weeks in the winter. The lack of sun is even worse. It can have a very real effect on mood if you're from somewhere that gets more reasonable amounts of sunlight, which is pretty much anywhere else in Canada.

I lived there for four years and I had a very tough time with the lack of sun. It can be very oppressive. Vancouver has a lot of things going for it (as you mentioned) but I think it's unfair to gloss over the overcast weather.

When the chiclet keyboards came out, I immediately liked typing on them and thought they were as good or better than any previous laptop keyboard.

I ordered a 2016 Macbook Pro, but when I tried the keyboard out in store I didn't like it very much. I was about 10-20% slower typing on it, and made far more mistakes than normal. I'm a fast typist so it was a big deal to me that the keyboard wasn't good. It just didn't feel right.

I didn't cancel my order, against my better judgement, thinking that I might get used to the new keyboard. While waiting for it I went back to the store a couple times and spent 30 minutes typing on the new keyboard, but still it didn't feel right.

When my laptop arrived, same feeling. After a week I was ready to return it, but had holiday return window so didn't rush it. Finally after 2 weeks it clicked, and I was typing up to speed and it felt good. Now when I go back to chiclet the keys feel heavy and squishy.

Something about the keyboard was a very big adjustment from any other I've used, and my first impression of it was quite bad. But now that I've gotten used to it I actually prefer it to anything else.

Maybe it's Stockholm syndrome, take that for what you will.

Tangent, but the Freudian id is usually rendered in all lowercase, and your meaning would be much clearer that way.

Montreal? Very cheap to live, probably the most cultured city in Canada. I'll admit the job situation isn't great there but that's why it's cheap. Calgary and Edmonton both have top notch symphonies, the world class Alberta Ballet, and burgeoning music scenes. Much cheaper than Vancouver or Toronto.

There are huge, huge affordability problems with Vancouver and Toronto, but they're hardly your only choices.

Yet another perspective: From http://water.usgs.gov/edu/wateruse-total.html in 2010 306 billion gallons of fresh water per day used in the united states. Volume of Lake Superior is very roughly 3,000,000,000,000,000 gallons.

V Lake Superior / (306 * 10^12 * 365) = 26.86 years

About 27 years of entire US water supply assuming no water cycle. Now that I do the math (hopefully I didn't screw it up), I'm not sure that's a big number or a small one actually.

A real shame, but I'm honestly surprised it lasted so long after Oink. Being the largest private torrent tracker is having a big target on your back.

Tangent: I found 1.4M to 1.7M employees for NHS on google. 64.1M people in the UK, 31.42M employed.

1.4M / 31.42M = 4.5% of the entire UK workforce works for NHS? Is this a normal distribution for a developed country?

Ignorant question: If I manage to buy all outstanding shares, do I not own the underlying assets? If so, why are the assets valued separately from the shares?